Juan Williams (JW): We're joined now by Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland, authors of Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life. 

Thanks for joining us. 

Wynton Marsalis (WM): Our pleasure. 

JW:  Let me start by asking you, Carl, a little bit about the genesis of the book.  This book is really a follow-up to another book that Wynton wrote.  What's the difference? 

Carl Vigeland (CV):  Well, in a sense it's a follow-up.  In another sense, it's a very different kind of book. 

I met Wynton more than ten years ago at a little club near where I live in Western Massachusetts.  And we started talking about music.  My background was in classical music.  Wynton, of course, plays classical, but it was jazz that he was performing.  And I was curious about how his music was made. 

And we stayed in touch with each other.  And he came back to Northampton about a year later, and we started talking a little bit more.  And he invited me to come to Boston with him.  And that is, in a sense, really when I started going out on the road with him. 

And we were in Boston one night talking about music.  And he played something for me at the piano.  And I looked at him, and I said, "You know, whatever kind of music it is, I always am curious to know how you go from what's inside you to that piano to making a response in me or anybody else who's listening."  And that's really how this book was born. 

JW:  Well, I'm thinking that, as I was reading through it, it's obvious that the book is as much about what's inside you and what's outside, but also about being on the road.  And so as you write in the preface to the book, it's about what you see and hear and feel as you're traveling around with musicians. 

But Wynton seemed to make it tough for you.  He said he didn't want you to be just a magazine writer.  He wanted something more. 

CV:  Right. 

JW:  What was the more? 

CV:  Well, I had to learn that.  I think I thought I was going to go out on the road for a couple weekends with him and then interview some people that he'd worked with and talk to the people in his band and our book would be all done in a couple months. 

And instead I realized the more I heard, the more I didn't know and the more I wanted to know.  So I became almost a nonplaying member of the band.  We traveled all over the country and spent many nights talking about what he does, what his band does.  I got to know everyone in the band. 

They even let me play the trumpet once.  We were out in, we mention in our book, out in a little club called Kimball’s East in the little town next to Oakland.  And Wynton was busy finishing up some work for a premiere of a ballet that was taking place soon after that in Brooklyn with Garth Fagan, and he didn't have time to go to the rehearsal. 

So I said, "I'll sit in.  I used to play the trumpet when I was younger." 

And I've never had an experience like this in my life.  It was as though someone invited you to take batting practice against Roger Clemens.  I sat down next to Wes Anderson at this club one late morning in California, and I couldn't believe the velocity of the music, let alone its complexity. 

And afterwards I guess Wes told Wynton that he should watch out, he might lose his gig. 

JW:  Wynton, let me bring you into this conversation. 

One of the things that jumps out at me in listening and reading you now in this book is the idea of recognition.  And at one point you have this interlude where you are talking about the notion of recognition where you say something and if someone recognizes your voice over the phone, then they respond.  But if they don't recognize your voice, then they hang up and say, "Hey, maybe you got the wrong number." 

And you say the same principle exists in music.  Tell me about it. 

WM:  Well, it's just the development of your personality and of what you think and feel to the point that a person knows what they're responding to.  Like you hear the sound of Lester Young, it evokes an immediate response.  And the more you listen to music, the more you can recognize whose voice and, you know, what you're going to get from it. 

Like you get a certain thing from talking to your mother that you don't get from talking to other people.  It's in the sound of the voice and the content and the quality of what she's going to say, even if you're having a trivial conversation, which is something like, "Why did you wear that yellow shirt with that blue suit?"  It's not anything profound that you're talking about, but just her voice evokes all of the other interactions that you've had, all of the other sharing of warmth and love and knowledge. 

And it's something that I would always notice when I was a little boy, the older jazz musicians would always know who it was.  And they would always make the statement when a record was on, "Oh, yeah, that's Stitt" or "That's Lockjaw," or "That's Coleman Hawkins." 

And I could never really tell who they were.  And how do they know that that's -- you know, they'd listen to an album and start naming everybody on the album.  "Yeah, that sounds like Sam Jones," or "That's Philly Joe playing drums," and "Oh, yeah, that's Wynton Kelly on the piano," or "Oh, no, no, that's not Wynton Kelly.  That's got to be --" some other musician. 

And as I got deeper into the music, I started to understand the importance of developing our own voice and having the confidence to present it. 

CV:  And then we had to do that in our book, which was a completely different kind of challenge.  And eventually we evolved into a kind of dialogue that sometimes tries to represent the same kind of dialogue that takes place on the bandstand, although playing a horn is not the same thing as telling a story. 

JW:  No, but you know, I was thinking as I was reading along sometimes the book struck me as almost like a manual for life, Wynton's life, but life for all of us, because I could hear his voice.  And Wynton was saying that jazz teaches us to be in time.  And I was thinking about this being in time, to really be present, to really interact, to focus on other voices. 

Wynton's just talking about hearing other voices.  But if you really hear other voices you're involved in a conversation.  But it's, for me as a nonmusician, it's hard to imagine hearing voices coming from instruments. 

Wynton, can you tell me what that's like?  Because on one level, I think, what you're doing with music is precision and requires precision and requires practice and composition, but here you're saying it's much more like conversation. 

WM:  All right, well, it's something that we're all used to, and it's something that Carl and I struggled with when we were writing the book and just getting along with each other.  We both play trumpet, we're both musicians.  He had written a book on the Boston Symphony.  And I was interested in Carl writing a book on the band because he wasn't prejudiced by a knowledge of jazz.  He wasn't prejudiced with the commonly held misconceptions. 

And it was interesting for me to see how someone who is a musician, whose father was a musician, my father is a musician, I'm from the South, he's from the North, how he would respond to the fact of somebody improvising and instead of giving a review of a band or a review or social critique, someone who could just enjoy the fact of a group of musicians improvising. 

And really there's a lot of precision, to go back to what you were saying, in using language.  Language is much more precise than just the words you choose to use.  You have the melody of your language.  For example, if you start to go up when you're talking, then you almost always will notice that somebody goes down.  Or if you're speaking and you make a mistake, you say, ‘Man, I was going to the...’ you'll take that pause to balance the rhythm out. 

And you'll notice that people's music almost always sounds like their language.  So in that way the sound of music is exactly like language.  And even though you and I use the same words, your voice evokes another entirely different set of circumstances and different experiences.  It has a different feeling to it than my voice has. 

And the same thing would be true if Studs Terkel were to start talking or if Shelby Foote talked or if you heard, you know, any of the myriad of wonderful voices that all of us are familiar with that we share.  Martin Luther King, just the sound of his voice saying a word, the integrity, the power, the magnetism, the charisma, the history, the knowledge and spirituality of the man is evident in the voice and in the sound and the rhythm of the cadence and the melody of the voice, more than the words themselves. 

CV:  I remember your saying that to me one night when we were talking about older musicians.  I think we were coming into New Orleans, but we could have been coming into New York.  And you were talking about the sound of the blues that you could hear in one note that Miles Davis would play. 

WM:  Right. 

JW:  You know, this comes to me—I remember reading that you had written, Wynton, that there was a trumpet player you once met who started second-guessing himself, started second-guessing his voice.  And according to the book, you say he suffered a nervous breakdown and stopped playing. 

So he lost his voice? 

CV:  He lost his gig. 

WM:  He lost the confidence to project his voice.  And that's something we all experience.  We can all look back into our childhood and remember times that we thought something was not correct.  Like it could be the way another child was being treated.  Many times it's the way an adult treats you or treats someone else, but you don't say anything.  So when you don't say anything, you lose your voice. 

Or you can be robbed of confidence in your voice by a chorus of voices that will shout you down because they don't agree with your perspective or there's no room for your way of thinking.  And you, in effect, lose your voice. 

So in the case of this trumpet player, he lost confidence in what he knew, his own ability to play.  He allowed the instrument and others—in the evaluations of his playing and too high expectations—to rob him of the pleasure, the sheer joy of playing and projecting whatever it was that he knew. 

JW:  So when you have the voice, the voice is not only coming through in your distinctive way of playing, but in this book Carl suggests that it's also your emotions coming out.  Carl writes, "Even when someone had crossed him, Wynton could usually box his feelings, square it, let it go, only to find it later when he was performing or composing, to be transmuted into an emotion that would move an audience to its own laughter or tears." 

So he talks about your dealings with Wycliffe Gordon and getting angry at him and then having it come out.  Tell me about it. 

WM:  Everything that you experience and what you know is a part of your music.  And music is such an ephemeral art, and it's the art of the invisible.  It's like a thought.  And it really lives in the same realm that thought and memory and all time-connected things exist.  You don't have the type of control over it.  Like if everything you thought came out of your mouth, man, you'd be in a world of trouble. 

JW:  You're telling me. 

WM:  And, you know, when you're playing a horn, it's that way.  You don't have enough control over the many different subtleties of music to keep things that you would keep inside, you can't keep them inside when you're playing music.  It's like you can't lie in music.  And the reason you can't lie in it is because you don't have the control over it. 

CV:  Plus people will recognize it if you're lying. 

WM:  Well, maybe they won't recognize it.  But you...

CV:  Your band will. 

WM:  People who know will recognize it.  But you don't have enough control to actually do that.  The lie will come out. 

Whereas when you're talking, you can use the words and you can use a certain concrete nature of language to construct things that are false.  Like, you couldn't contrive a sound like Louis Armstrong. 

CV:  Which gets back, actually, Juan, to the word you used that was interesting to me, which was "precision."  One of the discoveries I made in this music traveling all over the country with this band is how much precision there is in the music within the form, and that only enables the musicians to find a way to express their voices in time.  But another thing that I discovered is that it also roots them in the place where we all are. 

I don't think I'd ever experienced, traveling with this band, something in my life which connected for me in the way this music did a sense of this country, of the people who make up our country.  Wynton is always fond of talking about analogies that take place between the way a democracy works and the way a band works. 

But at an even more profound level, I think that there's something going on in this music which connects people through the voices of the musicians, their individual, specific voices, with their rootedness in a sense of where they are, not just in time but in place.  So that you can sense, when you're traveling with this band, but also when you're listening to the music, not only where you are but finally who you are, which was the greatest discovery for me personally and for us, I think, as a challenge in this book to express just in the experience of being on the road so many different places, so many different gigs. 

JW:  I want to come back to the road for a second, but before I do, Wynton, I wanted to ask you about this notion of "real jazz."  This is a term you use in the book, "real jazz."  And I notice you also say, when you were talking about the blues, you say the blues is a form like a sonata is a form, but when we think about jazz -- and coming back to this word "precision" -- you talk about real jazz. 

And so I'm thinking to myself, well, what is unreal or phony jazz? 

WM:  Well, phony jazz is like if you go to a record company and they tell you they really like you but they don't like your accent and they want you to change it or if you're a woman and you really can sing and they say, "Well, you know, we want to give you a contract, but you got to get in the gym and lose some weight, and you got to get this type of hairdo, and you can't sing about what you're singing about.  We want you to sing about this.  So we got to produce it for you.  And we're going to give you an image and everything.  And we want you to do this.  And we guarantee you'll make a lot of money." 

Well, you can do that, and maybe you'll make a lot of money, but you're a phony.  And phony jazz is that jazz which takes the saddest elements of the music and puts them out of proportion.  And it's not something that we're unfamiliar with in our culture, in our society, because we have become masters of that. 

Like an artificial drink, you know, like an artificial orange drink, tastes like it's more orange than an orange.  So when you get used to the artificial orange, to taste a real orange seems dull and unexciting, and you lose perspective on things. 

And fake jazz mainly has a backbeat.  It's like a funk tune.  And it has overdone emotion, (vocalizing).  It has that fake vibrato.  And it doesn't deal with things like the conception of swing and doesn't address the type of adult sensibility that you find in the blues.  It has a frivolity.  And its calling card is a lot of moving around and just general bullshitting. That's just the only way I can describe it.  And it takes you away from the feeling of jazz. 

JW:  I was going to say that in the book you mention that "Miles Davis once asked me what I thought music sounded like on Mars.  I said I didn't think about that kind of dumb shit.  He said, 'Oh.'" 

Now, this is a conversation between Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis.  And are you accusing him of in some ways being phony? 

WM:  Many times I accused him of that to his face and talked with him about it.  And once I asked him directly about it.  He said I will find out what it's like to be out here, because he said, "They never stop coming.  And they wear you down." 

CV:  He said that. 

JM:  He said that to me.  "They wear you down, man." 

JW:  Who's "they"? 

WM:  Who is "they"?  It's just the overall of what happens to wear you down.  It's like what happens when you're on a playground with some kids and they decide they're going to pick on one person.  You might not agree with it, but are you going to fight all of them? 

JW:  Right. 

WM:  I mean, you know, you just get worn down. 

CV:  But Wynton, didn't you find on the road—or don't you still, because you're still touring, and I've never in a sense come off the road with you either— that just in the same way that Juan is talking about real jazz, people sense in your relations with them when you meet them whether you are being authentic with them or not? 

I can think of so many different experiences we had, not just on the bandstand, Juan, but I remember when we were down in Kissimmee, Florida, once and Wynton's road manager at the time, Lolis Elie—who's now a terrific writer in New Orleans for the newspaper down there— and I just needed to stand up and move around for a minute.  And we walked next door to where the gig was taking place, they were having a sound check, and there was a gun show going on. 

And we thought, man, that would be kind of interesting to go in and check out some of these guns.  We'd never really been to a gun show, either of us.  And the man at the door stopped us and said, "Do you have, you know, your ticket?" 

And we said, "No." 

He said, "Well, you can't come in here." 

So we said, "Okay."  And actually, when we saw all these guns and these people, we weren't actually sure maybe how comfortable we'd be in there anyway.  So we stood outside for a little longer. 

And the sound check ended and then Wynton appeared.  And we were waiting for our ride, I think, back to the hotel. 

And he said, "What's going on in there?"  We told him, "There's a gun show, but you can't go in." 

And Wynton said, "Yes, I can." 

And we said, "Well, why don't you go ahead and try then." 

So we stood out there for a couple more minutes, Lolis and I, and then we turned around and Wynton wasn't anywhere.  So we went into this big rotunda next to the entrance to the gun show.  And looking through the glass door, there he was deep into a conversation with somebody about, you know, an old Colt 44 or something like that. 

Something in his connection with them struck an authentic chord.  And that sort of thing happened over and over and over again. 

I remember that woman in Jackson, Mississippi.  You were doing a workshop.  We had just been at Columbus the day before, an amazing gig at the Mississippi College for Women, where Eudora Welty went to school for, I believe, a year.  And it was a town in which there were so many antebellum mansions that the Civil War had just missed Columbus.  And many buildings had survived. 

And we went to to a reception there after the gig.  Wynton stayed up late into the evening talking to a woman whose family's ancestors traced all the way back to plantation owners in Columbus. 

And then the next day we went to Jackson.  And Wynton, as he always does when he has the time—even when he doesn't have the time— in little towns and great cities, gave a workshop for some kids at a college in Jackson.  And an old woman, whose name we never did get, came to that workshop.  And she sat, I remember, in the very last row— and I noticed that because I happened to be sitting up there too.  I wanted to stay out of the way of the students—and, during the question-and-answer period, she raised her hand. 

And she explained that she'd come to the workshop because she was too old to drive so she couldn't go out at night to the gig.  But she was so happy to hear Wynton not only speak but play a little trumpet because her father, she said, used to play the trumpet.  And she was wondering if Wynton would mind playing a solo that her father used to play. 

We tell this story in the book. 

And the solo was a great old trumpet.  It's really almost like the standard solo for a trumpet player.  If you can play this, it means you can start to play the trumpet, called Carnival of Venice.  And I remember you played that for her on the cornet.  Actually, it was her father played it on a cornet; you played it on your trumpet. 

And she just looked at you and said, "Thank you so much.  That meant the world to me." 

JW:  Well, Wynton, I wanted to ask about being on the road, coming back to something Carl was talking about.  Because at one point Carl writes that for you being on the road and performing was so important that you made the key point that any performance should not be like punching a clock.  It's got to be like the weekend.  It's got to sound to the audience like a good time. 

You care about every performance, even though you might be tired?  I know that's to be expected of a professional.  But in some ways it's almost as if it would be an unattainable goal. 

WM:  Man, I love the music so much and playing and I love people.  And I love playing for people.  And I take it, every second of it, seriously.  And I love it and I savor it. 

And it's the gigs when you're tired and it's the kids that you teach when you don't want to teach, that's when you have the chance to strengthen your feeling and your belief in what you're doing. 

And my father did it.  I watched him.  All the great musicians, Dizzy, Clark Terry, that I knew, they were believers in it.  And I believe in it.  And I love doing it.  And every time I touch my horn, if it's an elementary school at 8 o'clock in the morning and I'm playing "Happy Birthday" or "Mary Had a Little Lamb," my palms start to sweat sometimes because I want it to sound good. 

CV:  And you never know what's going to happen. 

WM:  And I'm serious, man.  I'm not joking.  Carl will tell you.  I want it to sound good, man.  I don't care.  I could leave the jam session at 4 o'clock in the morning and me and Wes get up at 7:30 and we go to some little school playing for little kids.  When we pull our horns out, it's like we're in the greatest concert hall in the world.  It doesn't make a difference. 

CV:  It's like that essay Ralph Ellison wrote that I remember reading on the bus with you.  I think it was, again, down in Florida. 

WM:  The little station. 

CV:  Yep. 

WM:  You never know who's there listening. 

JW:  In fact, you say that when you go to these small towns all across America, but, you know, all around the world, you're not interested in sightseeing.  You want to see something else, what's in the people. 

CV:  I'll give you an example of that, Juan. 

My other love besides music is golf.  It's sort of a strange combination, but to me they're both related to performance and expressing yourself.  And we were out on a tour in the western part of the country.  Spent a lot of time in California, and we were in Monterey one day. 

About one mile away from Pebble Beach, probably the most beautiful golf course in the United States.  And I never even got a chance to go over there and look at it.  We spent the whole time we were in Monterey getting ready for the gig at this little hotel where we changed.  It was a run-out from another gig in Los Gatos. 

And then we went to this club -- I don't remember the name of it, Wynton -- in Monterey where there was a young boy at the time -- he's a grown man -- named Erik Telford who couldn't get into the gig because the blue laws in that part of California required that if alcohol were served, even with food and if you'd come with your parents, you still couldn't get into the club. 

And I remember when Wynton heard this, he went back to introduce himself to Erik, who was not allowed to get by the door.  And he asked the doorman to keep the door open during the gig so Eric and his mother could stand outside the club and still hear the music. 

And I remember afterwards. 

JW:  So, Wynton, tell me, in the book you talk about the difference between some small town in Alabama and a small town in California being in the people, not in the place.  So that means you spend time talking to people,  playing jazz with people?  

WM:  All of that.  You know, meeting people, hanging with them, going to their house, eating food, keeping in touch with them.  Like Erik Telford called me maybe a month ago or something.  He's a man now.  And he went to Berkeley playing trumpet.  He's still playing. 

And I've seen that over and over, not just in people who are musicians.  Man, about six months ago or so I was in New York and I was down on Wall Street, in that Wall Street area, and two guys stopped me who were stockbrokers.  They said, "Man, you came to the University of Alabama in 1980-something, and you know, you gave a clinic.  And you talked to us.  And you signed this thing.  And my grandfather" went into this long story.  "Where you going, man?" 

You know, so you meet people all over and you sustain relationships with them.  And they teach you more about what's going on.  Not just musicians.  People of all kinds.  They teach you more about what's going on in the area.  They teach you things about history.  They teach you what they know. 

And all you have to do is learn how to listen to them and check them out and be patient, and you get all kinds of material to put in your music.  And you get a much better, broader, more complete understanding of what's going on in the world that you live in.  You get a much better understanding of the present, instead of getting information from a newspaper or a broadcast or something.  You usually get a melange of just incomplete, incorrect information that's been made palatable by putting it in a sound-byte size. 

CV:  Goes back to your word "real," Juan.  And actually when we're talking about people Wynton has met, one of the most amazing things to me was to discover that virtually every musician that's in his band is someone who he's met in the same way almost as he met Eric Telford, people who are, you know, young musicians, maybe in high school, came to a gig that Wynton was playing in. 

I can remember we were in New Orleans once, and he invited everybody in the audience if they'd brought their instruments, to come on up on the stage.  Must have been 50 kids up there playing with the band.  One of those kids was Nicholas Payton, who is now a world-famous trumpet player in his own right. 

JW:  Now, Wynton, there's a scene in the book that I think is just tremendous.  And a woman is described by Carl as standing to the side of the room and says, "Is there such a thing as a love song?"  

And in response, you begin to play Gershwin's the "Embraceable You." 

WM:  Right.  

JW:  Why? 

WM:  Because that's a love song.  So when she asked me if there's a love song, that's it.  That's a love song. 

Plus, I was looking at her a certain way.  Like a lot of times just with people, like, we all know how we want to be.  We all want to be addressed and embraced a certain way and looked at a certain way and dealt with honestly.  That's why I know the woman, she would understand what I was telling her. 

It's like we're children again.  And you come to somebody with your first little toy that you got from somewhere, "Man, what you think about this?"  You know, he could throw it on the ground and stomp on it or be jealous of it or look at it and say, "Wow!" you know, any of the type of initial response. 

That's why I know I could go into a gun shop with a bunch of rednecks and the Confederate flag flying somewhere in Florida and walk in and just start asking a cat about an old musket or something or some possum stew or whatever.  I mean, it don't really make a difference what it is.  Just start talking to him about some subject and hearing what he has to say about something, because he goes to the bathroom the same way I do.  He experiences the same thing I experience. 

And the woman, she knew there was a love song when she asked me the question. 

JW:  Oh, you know, I was wondering if she was like heartbroken or if she was going through a rough patch in her life. 

WM:  You know, it could have been any of that.  There was no way for me to ascertain that.  But one thing I knew is she knew that there was a love song, but she wanted me to give her something that had some love in it, for that minute or two minutes. 

And then after that, she was going to be cool because she knew there was some guy that came there from somewhere who people say was famous and she was checking him out, talking to the kids, hey, he's not bad.  Nice guy.  The kids like him.  "Is there a love song?" 

"Yes, ma'am.  This is a love song right here." 

CV:  I remember there were some kids in the audience where we were doing a workshop in Oakland.  And a little boy in the audience raised his hand, and his question was, "Mr. Marsalis, have you ever played in Florida?  And in fact, do you play professionally?"  It's just amazing some of the questions you get asked. 

And then we went and played some basketball at a housing project right after that, and a couple hours later we're back in Los Gatos, California -- it's that same tour where we went to Monterey. 

JW:  Now, Wynton, when you write about this incident with this woman in Oakland, you say, quote, "Is there such a thing as a love song?  It's what sings through you when you're making love." 

WM:  Oh, yes indeed.  Everybody can understand that who knows about it.  There's something. 

CV:  The mystery in music is how you convey that.  You know, people forget sometimes, to take the instrument that Wynton plays, it's just a piece of metal.  And when you first pick it up, it's cold.  And you have to learn how to not only warm that metal up enough so that you can play it, but warm it up through your playing in a way that will connect to the people that are listening.  It's a daily challenge.  It's just like the challenge of writing. 

JW:  So when you're making love, Wynton, you're feeling the "Embraceable You" by Gershwin? 

WM:  No.  I mean—no, man. 

You know, I'm one of those kind of people. I really don't like music on when I'm making love to a woman.  Some people, it's an indispensable tool. 

When I was younger I used to make tapes and kind of choreograph the tape, you know, what was going to go on at a certain point.  And that would impose a certain thing on what was going to go on. 

And when two people come together, it's such a lyrical thing.  It's like a horizontal dance in many ways.  And you have so much rhythm and tempo and so many things with music that's not necessarily melodic.  When we think of music, we only think of (vocalizing), the tune "Embraceable You." 

But when I played this particular "Embraceable You" for the woman, I didn't really play the melody at all.  And the thing that goes through you, a feeling, it's the sound, the coursing, the rhythm, the to-and-fro of it, the counterpoint, the back-and-forth, the texture, the percussion of making love to a woman and also just the general exchange of information.  It's not you saying something.  It's just the sharing that goes on and also the totality of the experience. 

Like when it's great, it's great.  When it's not great, it's not great.  The ebb and flow.  All of these are things that are so lyrical and musical and harmonic.  Making love comes more out of the rhythmic and harmonic aspect of music. 

And when I say harmonic, what I mean is that harmony—once I asked Leonard Bernstein, I said, "Man, how do you teach people about harmony?"  I read his chapter on harmony and I saw a thing on the Young People's Concerts where he was talking about harmony. 

And he said, "Man, that's..." you know, he talked about hows.  And he said, "That's a very difficult one.  If you figure out how to do that, let me know." 

And the thing that makes harmony so difficult is Western people, being in harmony is not something that we're interested in.  We like combating things.  Like you learn in school, man versus nature.  You can't "verse" nature. 

So when we talk about making love to a woman, we talk about harmony.  In music, the one note, if somebody hits a C, that one note has many other notes in it.  It's called the overtone series.  Now, one note is already harmonized, even though one principal tone sounds.  When you start playing groups of notes together and then those groups of notes start to move, what that means is that at a certain time one note is very important.  Then in the very next second that note could be of very little significance.  Then the third time that note could be of completely no significance.  Then another second later it could once again be a principal note. 

And that's really an important thing to understand about harmony.  And that's also how making love is.  Sometimes you take the front; sometimes you have to get in the background.  It's like the ebb and the flow of many different things. 

CV:  It's not that different from telling a story, in a sense.  Getting back to our book, in fact, one of the challenges was how to figure out how to incorporate a principle such as harmony into the telling of different stories about this music and about the people who come to the concerts and meet Wynton and the band. 

And "Embraceable You" actually makes five or six appearances in our book. 

As a way of trying to express, among other things, this concept of harmony in a book, I remember another time the band was playing in Montgomery, Alabama -- and this was one other occasion where I decided rather than to listen to the sound check I would walk around.  I'd never been to Montgomery before, and I ended up walking down to the bottom of a street called Commerce Street, which is where the old cotton wharves, back when Alabama was the capital of the slave trade and the cotton trade, were located.  And now it's a tourist stop. 

And I walked up from Commerce Street all the way to Martin Luther King Jr.'s former church, where as you're standing you can look up a little further and see the state house where Governor Wallace used to be the governor.  And then I walked back to the theater where Wynton was playing.  And what were they playing as I walked in?  "Embraceable You." 

And we tried for a long time -- in fact it was practically the last thing we wrote together— to figure out how we could harmonically express the union of those opposites, all of the history that's represented by that community and the changes that have taken place even since Reverend King was there. 

JW:  Now, Wynton, I wanted to come back to something else that requires some precision and some harmony, which is something apparently you do regularly on the road to calm yourself, ironing.  Why do you make such a big deal out of ironing clothes? 

WM:  Well, I don't really—it's not to calm myself so much.  It's just before the gig you got to look good, you know. 

CV:  He tried to teach me how to iron, but I'm still a failure. 

WM:  I hate to have wrinkles on my vine.  Man, it's just something that I...

CV:  Our worst argument I think maybe was when I volunteered one night, because he was in a hurry, to press his jacket.  And I started, and he just started hollering at me. 

He said, "You know, there's a form to it.  It's like music.  And even if I'm late to the gig this time, I got to do my own ironing." 

JW:  You say you have a vision of how the jacket should hang. 

WM:  It's got to hang right.  We live in the era where being clean, a lot of times you get attacked for that.  Like you're supposed to be on a bandstand raggedy, sort of like you're coming from playing ball.  But I believe in being clean, man.  I'm from that old school, South, go to church clean, go on the bandstands, when people have paid for tickets, be clean.  And to come up there with a big wrinkle on your vine, that's just—oh, man. 

JW:  Well, you know, another thing that caught my eye in the book was your conversation, your interplay with the reader, the jazz that you create in the book with the reader, about Jesus, in which you say, when someone told you that if you don't believe in Jesus, you're going to go straight to hell, you said, "Well, that's not for me." 

WM:  Yeah, I just didn't believe that the rest of the people on earth who didn't believe in that were all going to be punished for that.  And, you know, it's like certain topics in the United States you don't touch on because it creates a furor and people take it the wrong way and you get accused of many things.  And it's another way of trying to rob you of your freedom of speech, really.  And religion is one of those things. 

CV:  Speaking of which, another one of our challenges was to figure out how to deal with subjects also which people don't like to talk about in a way that was authentic but also connected to what you're talking about, Juan.  Not just religion but kind of as a subtheme the subject of race actually runs through much of what we're writing about. 

Not just in Montgomery, but I experienced, as a person traveling with the band, some of our country's social and fundamentally political problems in a way that I had never imagined could occur. 

Even in the city of New York, where we're talking today I can remember after a recording session at the old BMG studios, we got out pretty late.  I think you were recording "Blue Interlude," your first long piece, Wynton. And I happened to be the only white person standing at the corner when we were looking for a taxi.  And I had to hail cabs for the band. 

JW:  I can believe that. 

CV:  You know, the late twentieth century in New York City. 

JW:  Wynton, though, I wanted you to come back to Jesus.  And you were talking about how, in fact, there's certain things that you're not supposed to talk about in American life.  It takes away your freedom of speech.  Is that the way you feel about Christianity? 

WM:  No, not about Christianity, but about the concept that other people are going to burn in hell because they don't believe what you believe.  You know, I believe in Jesus.  I grew up Christian.  But I don't believe there are people who are not like me are going to hell because they're not like me. 

And I don't believe that that was Jesus' vision for the world.  Jesus was teaching people love. 

I always have to make the point to religious people who try to beat you over the head with their religion, think of the person that loves you the most in the world.  In most people's cases that would be their mother.  If you committed a crime and you went to jail -- you ever see the lines of people for the buses that leave New York on 59th Street to go to jail?  It's all women.  You see a man every now and then, but it's like people's mothers, their wives.  And they always saying, "Damn they're running us through this." 

When you do something that's unthinkable and you suffer the greatest hurt, the person that loves you the most is the person that will embrace you in that moment, not the one who's going to kick you out, not the one who's going to embarrass you or say you're a fool and you've disrespected our family.  That person will come to you and extend a warmth to you and make you feel like you can survive.  That's what love is about. 

So a man who is on earth to teach love and embody that is not going to tell you you're going to hell if you don't believe in him. That's not what love is about, even in a human form.  So definitely not in a spiritual form. 

CV:  Isn't that what this music is about too? 

WM:  That's definitely what this music is about. 

CV:  It's inclusive.  It doesn't shut anybody out. 

WM:  When I was at NPR we did a series called “Making the Music.”  And we would ask every musician that we interviewed—and we interviewed hundreds of musicians— what is jazz music about?  And to a man and to a woman they said, "It's about love."  To a person, "This music is about love." 

And I mean that's just where our music is coming from.  And that's the thing that's kept from people a lot of time under the headline of perspective. 

CV:  Or what's current or...

JW:  Well, in fact, one of the things I noted was there was a moment where you said,  I don't know, you said you were angry, but you noted that when Branford, your brother left the band, when that split occurred, it was painful for you.  And you thought there were other people who were getting off on the idea that Wynton Marsalis is in pain. 

WM:  Well, not so much that I'm in pain, but the whole fact of jazz and rock, you know, or anything of a certain quality in that which is commercial, that which is qualitative always is forced to take a back seat for that which is not that substantial. 

And that's the direction our culture has decided to go in.  There are like battle lines drawn between these things.  And as the commercial becomes more successful, the battle lines are less and less, the seriousness is becoming more decimated by the trite and the trivial and the insignificant. 

So when you enter into that battle, there's a huge side that wishes for all things that decry a lack of grace and of sophistication and of elegance.  There are things that are always on the side of the loud and the garish and the commercial and the money-laden.  That's just how that battle goes. 

So it was not so much that it was about necessarily me and my brother.  Just in this case it was about me and him.  But the larger point that I was making is that even though that hurt me deeply and I was angry about it and also he was, both of us kept doing whatever we were doing.  I was out.  Hey, I'm playing music.  And so was he.  And he hasn't stopped doing what he's doing because of it, and I haven't stopped.  And we're still out here. 

And so the point was just to say that the world spins around with all of us on it.  And that's also a harmony in a way.  You got the minor chords and you got the major ones too.  And they all function together, like me and Carl Vigeland. 

JW:  All right.  Well, Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland, thanks so much for joining us.

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